‘Who would have thought that Paul Dacre, the self-appointed voice of ‘middle England’, harboured such aristocratic fantasies as to acquire a mighty Scottish estate, complete with deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon fishing?’
Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/REUTERS

What a delight to discover the Daily Mail’s editor Paul Dacre has trousered some £460,000 since 2011 from the EU he daily traduces. Hypocrisy! That’s the charge, as Buzzfeed discovers the common agricultural policy Dacre excoriates for extravagance turns out to finance him for the “encouragement of tourist activities” and “payments to farmers in areas with handicaps”. Someone on his Langwell estate, a gillie maybe, put out a statement saying the payments “included reimbursements for extensive woodland planting schemes (native – not commercial trees) to improve the ecology of this wildly beautiful and remote area”, and the estate makes “a not insignificant contribution to the local economy”.

Daily Mail editor received £88,000 in EU subsidies in 2014

Read more

The details are delicious. Who would have thought the self-appointed voice of “middle England” harboured such aristocratic fantasies as to acquire a mighty Scottish estate, complete with deer stalking, grouse shooting and salmon fishing? Imagine this champion of a fantasy “ordinary British family” in a pair of plus- fours or maybe a Prince Charles kilt, shotgun under arm. His monarch of the glen posturing reduces the ogre of Kensington High Street to a pleasing absurdity. To show he really has taken on authentic burdens of the landed gentry, the statement adds, “the business runs at a loss”. What’s more this is the second estate on which he claims subsidies: his Sussex arable and cattle farm is similarly blessed with CAP funds.

It’s funny, but then how else can a man dispose of some £2.5m a year? The eye-popping size of his salary is more of an issue than what he spends it on. No one is worth that. No wonder he has no notion at all of what “ordinary” is. No wonder the Mail described Labour’s mansion tax on £2m homes as an attack on the “middle class”: the Mail’s own Zoopla site lists the average home at £305,000.

Dacre’s newspaper frequently bewails some new assault on the “middle classes” that turns out to mean fees rising in private schools – which 7% of children attend, not “middling” at all. The Mail calls any fiscal drag on the 40% higher tax band another attack on “middle-income families”, though only 15% earn that much. So outraged were they about any cut in pensions tax relief that they frightened Osborne away from touching a vast state benefit that goes mainly to the richest 8%.

Most of the Mail’s readers would have gained significantly from a flat rate of pension tax relief – but how were they to know? Polling shows most people are dangerously ignorant about where they stand on the national earnings scale, most imagining they are much nearer the middle than they are, and that includes the very poor. They wildly underestimate the earnings of the rich and Dacre makes it his job to keep them in the dark. Although the Mail berates overpaid public chief executives of health trusts or local authorities, Mail readers wouldn’t know even these are paid less than a tenth of his salary.

That has been the great Tory trick down the centuries. By appealing to an idea of “aspiration” and by deluding voters about pay distribution, they induce people to vote against their own interests. No wonder the Tories and their press seek to destroy the BBC, calling its corrective, accurate facts “biased”.

Does Britain's rightwing press really want to bring about Brexit?

Read more

Of course we don’t all vote with our wallets. So Dacre can bite the hand that feeds him in the EU, despite the windfall the CAP has paid him. In the same way, some people earning professional salaries, who always gain from Tory governments’ gifts to the best off, nonetheless vote Labour because that’s what they think is right, regardless of financial interest. Some mansion-dwellers did vote for the mansion tax. Yet the Mail has a formula that abuses them all as hypocrites and “champagne socialists”, as if they were class traitors for not voting Tory.

On the Richter scale of Daily Mail hypocrisies, Dacre’s CAP bonanza, worth far more than the average wage, is relatively small potatoes. No space here – or anywhere – can do justice to the wild hypocrisy of that paper’s treatment of women, celebs and ordinary folk, let alone its grotesque portrayal of people on low incomes or its constantly shifting dividing line between “deserving” and “undeserving” citizens. The Mail is not even consistent in the targets for its bullying: the bully editor’s whim is final.

On Europe where the nation’s fate hangs in the balance, the role of the British media may turn out to be pivotal. The Mail and the Murdoch press matter most, with the Telegraph and Express marching behind, all spilling out headlines filled with migrant scare stories and Euro-lies of gigantic distortion. The spectacle of 90% of the press in full cry is an unbearably daunting reminder of all that is at stake.

This is already morphing into a battle of strength, a war to the death: who rules the country, Dacre and Murdoch or the elected government? Winning matters to them now in a visceral way far beyond the mere question of Britain better in or out of the EU. This is becoming a very British culture war about who we are and above all, who will be in charge when this referendum is over. If on 24 June Dacre and Murdoch can gloat it was them wot won it, if they are the kingmakers deciding who runs post-referendum Britain, God help us all. Dacre will consider his £460,000 EU subsidy a trifle easily forgone when so much real muscle-power is at stake.